Handling large social gaming website traffic - what points to remember?

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Handling large social gaming website traffic - what points to remember?

Hi all,

I was hoping someone here can help me out with some info I require.

I have posted a job onto a freelancers website to make me (quote me) a social gaming web application like GameDuel and Playandwin.co.uk, where users can play good addictive games and win prizes such as; money, virtual currency, tangible items like an iPod... items added by admin (me) like adding items to an ecommerce site.

As I have had offers from developers from all over the work, the most concerning is India, I want to make sure I am specific in what I want and will produce a detailed requirements doc before the project commences. I do have some experience with web and desktop application development, but this would talk me far too long to complete, so would rather delegate the task to a pro if possible.

Anyway, the main question I wanted to ask was how can I ensure that the application, probably written in either PHP, JS, Flash, or HTML5, is capable of handling large quantities of traffic activity? I want to make sure I do not pay to have an application made, but that crashes constantly after member reach into double figures.

Generally the application code itself is of much less importance than the database design, configuration, indexing, and query logic; at least in terms of performance. The exception to that rule might be if a game requires a lot of intensive calculation/processing that is not within the database domain, in which case selecting the best algorithms and implementing them in the right way could make a measurable difference.

Of course, hardware is relatively cheap these days, so if you are getting the sort of traffic where your application code can't keep up with things, it may ultimately be less expensive to simply add another application server and a load-balancer to handle that traffic. (Hopefully if you get to that point, you are making enough money that it's a fairly minor budget concern. )

So, one of the things I'd concentrate on when looking for candidates to implement this is their level of expertise in database design and optimization.

Thinking about it, the database design is a very important aspect, something I learnt about during Uni but would hae forgotten had I not asked this question.

And the Beta and reports idea, good thinking, I like it... Remind me, QA? Quality Assurance?

Thanks again guys for the help...

Back in the day (like a decade or two ago), testing was QC: Quality Control. Quality Assurance was all about the process: everything about the development life-cycle that was targeted toward attaining high quality of the product (of which QC was just one part). Nowadays, however, if you say you need to hire a "QA guy", everyone knows you (probably) mean a tester.